Women today are taking on more leadership roles and responsibilities, but making the right choices and decisions to move your career forward can still be tricky. We here at StumbleUpon champion the progress of women in the technology industry and recognize that the average career woman faces a host of unanswered questions on how to take their career to the next level as a professional female.

To spark some interesting discussion on the topic, StumbleUpon is partnering with Scoutmob and Girls in Tech to host a meetup and talk about some of the issues women face in leadership everyday in their careers and personal life.

We’ve put together a panel of tech female professionals to address questions under the theme of “Can I Succeed in Tech Without Being a “Bossypants”? How do you balance a sense of confidence without coming across as too bossy, too mean, too “whatever”? Are the rules and regulations of the workplace different for women in technology?

The meetup will be held on July 17th, 2012 from 6-9pm at 111 Minna in downtown San Francisco – make sure to RSVP in order to gain entrance! We’ll discuss this topic and aim to address burning questions like:

- How does one succeed as a woman in technology without being perceived as a “Bossypants”?
- How is managing men in tech the same as or different from being managed by a man?
- How are women leaders perceived differently than male leaders in our society?
- When is the right time to start one’s own company or take one’s hobby to a professional level?
- Is it necessary to go to graduate school to be credible and be taken seriously as a woman in tech?
- How do you ask for a raise or promotion without looking “too pushy”?
- Can women succeed in tech without the support of a successful spouse/partner?

Feel free to get the conversation started early on Twitter and your social networks with the hashtag #SFBossypants too!

Jesse Draper is creator and host of “The Valley Girl Show” through which she’s become a spokesperson for startups and helped pioneer the way of new media content distribution. Formerly a Nickelodeon star, Draper is now CEO of Valley GirlTM where she runs pre-production through post-production and distribution for the show, runs technology blog Lalawag.com and is a regular featured writer for the Mashable, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post and Glam. Draper is also a speaker at business conferences around the world including DLD, SXSW and universities such as Stanford.

Johanna leads the team developing Google’s search user interface and features, including Google Instant, Mobile Search, Universal Search, and Autocomplete as well as hundreds of improvements made to Google search each year. Prior to joining Google, Johanna worked at a number of software start-ups in New York City. Johanna holds an MBA from UCLA and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Barnard College.

Prior to Eventbrite, Julia worked in several managemnt roles in television companies including MTV Networks and FX Networks. She left to co-found Eventbrite, the ticketing and event service, with her husband. Her focus on company culture has helped make Eventbrite one of the Top 5 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area according to the SF Business Times.

Rashmi is the CEO of SlideShare, focusing on product strategy and design. Before SlideShare, she built MindCanvas, a game-like survey platform for customer research. Rashmi has a PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology from Brown University and conducted research on search engines and recommender systems at UC Berkeley. She was recently named amongst the World’s Top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 by Fast Company and is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo and Future of Web Apps.

Liz Gannes has been a Silicon Valley-based business technology reporter since 2004, where she started her career as a reporter at Red Herring. She was the second employee at the technology blog network GigaOM, where she covered the rise of the social Web.
As part of GigaOM, in 2006, Ms. Gannes founded NewTeeVee, a site that became the preeminent source for news and analysis about Internet video and ultimately the intersection of entertainment and technology.
She graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in Linguistics.

Bring your own questions too! We’ll start the ball rolling with several questions for the first half of the panel, and open it up to audience questions after that. The event starts at 6pm and will allow for networking before and after the panel as well. Come thirsty for cocktails and conversation as the first 200 guests will get a free drink on us along with some fun StumbleUpon swag.

Please RSVP for what promises to be a good night of enlightened conversation. Can’t wait to see you all there!